Back in the US of A

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Typed up: on plane to Boston
Posted from: Jane and Tom's place in Boston

Back "home," we've been very busy. We stayed at Andy and Juliette's place for about a week and a half visiting friends and doing chores, before driving up to the Bay Area where I had a job interview. Things looked promising, we looked at apartments, I went to another interview just in case, Danielle had an interview. I accepted my first offer, and we drove down to Andy and Juliette's again.

For a few days we did nothing but relax, in preparation for moving. We packed up a truck on Saturday, and unloaded it at our new apartment on Sunday. Having gotten rid of about half of our stuff at the start of the trip really made this step a lot easier. Still, now we are in a position where we need to buy a fair amount of furniture. Monday is when I started my job, leaving Danielle to do a lot of the unpacking. That was almost 2 weeks ago now. We're mostly unpacked and I'm finally starting to get the hang of the new routine.

In that time we haven't experienced the culture shock that some people describe. Certainly things are different from where we've been, but they're also the way that they've been for us most of our lives. The main thing we noticed is how rich people here are. The average US homeless person has more possessions than the average person in India. The other big thing we noticed was that women here have just about any job there is. We both immediately noticed that the shuttle-bus driver was a women.

Being able to understand the language of everybody around us was also not as nice as you might think. In fact it was a bit distracting at first. I was just as happy in the Philippines where everybody we wanted to talk to spoke English. All in all it took us a surprisingly short time to get back into a "normal" life, and it was easier than expected. Which is the story of our trip, really. Traveling the world isn't that hard. There's all kinds of information available. The only thing you need is money, and you need less of that than you might think.